Tesseract Is Looking Okay For A Small, Open-Source Game

Yesterday marked the first release of Tesseract, the open-source game forked from the Cube 2: Sauerbraten code-base two years ago and since then has just been worked on by a handful of open-source developers. After trying out this inaugural Tesseract version, it's quite a nice small game with decent OpenGL visual capabilities and okay textures with its in-game assets being comparable roughly to Xonotic or Unvanquished.

I've been in contact with the lead Tesseract developer for some time and with the game being scriptable to allow for automated benchmarking, of course, it means I'll give it a whirl. I've been experimenting with Tesseract for a few hours and it's already been incorporated into the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org.

It's as easy as running phoronix-test-suite benchmark tesseract to automatically download, setup, and run a fully-reproducible test case of the game for comparing hardware, drivers, or other components. The test profile page is on OpenBenchmarking.org. For those that have yet to dive into making your own automated test-cases or wish to contribute new tests to our GPLv3 benchmarking software, here's the raw test profile.

Here's a quick benchmark of an ASUS Zenbook Prime UX32VDA with NVIDIA GT 620M graphics on the NVIDIA Linux binary blob against Intel HD 4000 Ivy Bridge graphics with Mesa 10.1 from Ubuntu 14.04... To some surprise, the Intel graphics do well against the discrete GPU with fully-capable blob driver, but I'm still exploring Tesseract to see how it runs across a diverse spectrum of drivers and hardware.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.